Category: troubled heart

This morning shortly after arriving to work I became fixated on something my 8-year old made for me when he was in preschool. To think that that was just over 3 years ago is bizarre. On the one hand it feels like just yesterday. But on the other it’s as though it were so long ago. Who I was then, where I was, what I was doing was completely different. And in that time my son has grown in so many of his own brilliant ways most assuredly.

What the message reminds me of is a lesson I have found myself sharing with my son over and over and over again. Because yes, there are times when I’ll catch him feeling sorry for himself; he feels he’s been cheated out of something that someone else got and he didn’t. And what I’ll tell him is how important it is to focus on what he has instead of what he hasn’t got. It’s amazing to watch those little wheels turning inside his head as a shift in perspective begins to take place on his face and in the way he proceeds with his life. He moves on. He gets over it. He learns to appreciate what he already has instead of clinging to feelings of jealousy and insecurity. He remembers the love in his life. (And the ice cream I just treated him to perhaps!)

There is something for me to take away from this, too. How often have I pined away for a love that couldn’t be reciprocated? How often have I wallowed in sorrow, loneliness, and discontent? Or wondered why other people get to fall in love and live happily ever after and I don’t? All the while forgetting–even deliberately–that I am already surrounded by so much love in my life. And who am I to expect more than what is already given me?

Maybe in a relationship, the thing that keeps it from going anywhere is the fear deep within ourselves that we are imperfect beings capable of hurting others; capable of feeling hurt; capable of destroying; capable of being destroyed. When we become intimate with another imperfect being, tensions do arise because building intimacy requires that we reflect as a mirror to the other person both how we see them and how they truly see themselves, deep within. And sometimes we do not like what we see; we loathe what we see whenever how we feel inside isn’t congruent with the reflection of ourselves in the mirror that is our partner. We feel hurt. We feel destroyed. We feel the need to hurt. We feel the need to destroy. And so it goes; an endless cycle between creation and destruction.

We create stories in our head that we tell ourselves to hold on to; we replay them over and over in our minds. We eat these stories; we drink these stories; we dream these stories, over and over and over. They become us and we become them. But what if there is more to the story than what we are allowing into our self-narration? What if there’s another truth of ourselves? One that’s deeper, and richer, and more fulfilling? Wouldn’t we want to follow that, to use our mirror’s reflection to better ourselves? Wouldn’t we want to create ever more of this type of dream, instead of destroying our only hope for everlasting redemption?

Sometimes you’re just too angry to cry. I keep trying to wrap my head around it: How did we get here? I suspect true honesty was lacking, finally leading us astray. Why couldn’t he tell me about her? Was it just too painful to accept her ghost? Yet she was always there. In the back of his mind, whispering his name. Her face. Her body. Kept calling. His heart. His desire. Kept growing. I threatened to take her away. That’s when I became impossible to take. And so it is that he left me with this skin too callused for another to touch.